Craig Baker: Leadership at the Point of Contact
What happens when a leader who sold the vision steps back into the reality of delivering it? In this episode of On the Subject of Leadership, I speak with Craig
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Management
On the daily, unglamorous work but vitally important work of managing people—a discipline in its own right, not a consolation prize for those who didn't make leadership.
81 essays
Hiring a $200 Hammer
Organisations keep buying $200 hammers and handing them to people who have never built anything more demanding than a flat-pack bookshelf. The problem is never the quality of the hire. It is the quality of the context into which the hire is placed.
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Martin Kearns: From Empowerment to Ritual—Agile’s Unintended Consequences
What happens when a movement built on autonomy becomes a system of rituals? In this episode of On the Subject of Leadership, I speak with Martin Kearns—one of the
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The Five Forms of Hard Work: Consistency, Focus, and the Leader’s Portfolio
Durable advantage is built less on intensity than on cadence, habit, and protected attention. If you want to design routines that stick, reduce attention residue, limit false work, and turn standards into rhythms—read on.
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Chris McGowan: The Recruitment Insider Who Built a Company With No Managers
Flat organisations are usually presented as a philosophy. More often they are a headcount. The literature on networked teams and post-hierarchical work is written, almost without exception, from firms
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Giving Bad News, Badly
Bad news rarely breaks trust; bad delivery does. Too often managers turn necessary cuts into needless cruelty. Yet, predictability, clear reasons, real control, and concrete compassion can preserve dignity and actually build trust even when decisions hurt.
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A Six-Move Playbook for Managers Who Need Truth and Traction
A practical guide for managers who need candid teams and consistent delivery. Six disciplined moves that sharpen judgment, normalise challenge, and build the structures that keep work honest, focused, and on track.
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A Delicate Dance of Trust and Openness
Psychological safety is often miscast as comfort. It's time to restore a harder edge: as a discipline that lets teams surface error early, challenge authority safely, and keep standards sharp—especially in hybrid work, where voice is fragile and candour is the real performance engine.
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Lessons from Bach: Rethinking Modern Hiring Practices
Johann Sebastian Bach’s “mediocre” appointment in Leipzig offers a sharp lesson for today’s hiring. Organisations often chase unicorns, mistaking signals for substance. True value lies in suitability—clarity of purpose, openness to varied forms of competence, and sound judgment—rather than surface c
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The Creator vs. the Passenger: Rethinking Recruitment in Charities
Many charities hire from big-name firms expecting transformation, only to find prestige doesn’t equal performance. The real divide isn’t charity versus business—it’s creators versus passengers. Creators build momentum from scarcity; passengers coast on brand halo. Recruitment must look for scars, no
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Your Job Title Is the Ceiling They Hand You, Your Capability Is the Skylight You Cut
Titles often serve as tools of exclusion rather than accurate barometers of capability. Skills-based approaches expand opportunity and strengthen outcomes. By rethinking hiring signals, leadership speech, and development pathways, organisations can unlock talent, foster fairness, promote moral agenc
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Managing People Isn’t a Side Hustle: Time to Re-Professionalise Management
Managing People Isnt a Side Hustle Time to Re Professionalise Management0:00/618.6721× A while back I mentored a gifted software engineer—let's call her Priya. Priya
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Strategic People Architecture
Most organisations obsess over 10-year business strategies but forget to plan for the people who'll deliver them. Strategic people architecture fixes that. It institutionalises structured chance-giving, succession scaffolding, and developmental stretch—ensuring talent is grown, not guessed at. Done
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The Talent Aperture, Reopened
In a world of automated hiring, human discernment is vanishing. Part III of the Talent Aperture Series explores how over-reliance on algorithms compromises diversity, adaptability, and ethics. Yet through a three step process we can restore judgement as a core capability in hiring—and outlines how o
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Signals vs Substance in the Hiring Process
Hiring systems still favour credentials over capability, filtering out adaptable generalists in favour of narrow signals. Yet, organisations can reverse this trend by investing in potential, re-skilling, and internal talent pipelines. By prioritise substance over signals managers don't just hire bet
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